Helping Baby Boomers to continue to earn income, as long as they want

07/08/2017

Those Ghosts - Some More Than Half Century Old (or young)

Is it possible for adults determined to move forward with our little lives to become "ghost-free?

Not likely.

I've been wrestling with ghosts since the mid 1960s.

That's when I left the mean streets of Jersey City, New Jersey for genteel Seton Hill College, Greensburg, Pennsylvania. (One dorm-mate brought along from Richmond, Virginia, a hoop for her ball gown.)

But what I do know is that the ghosts can be bullied back into the deep level of hell from which they ascended.

Of course, there is no one best way to accomplish that.

What has panned out for me is investing the time and transportation/motel funding to descend back into the hell - or what I experienced to be the worst of my life way back then.

Six months ago, I made the journey to Jersey City. The mean streets I managed to survive are even meaner.

However, big parts of that location so near Manhattan have become gentrified. The current residents of those upscale locations aren't encountering the same demons I did. But they will be haunted. That's how we are wired to process what is and then play it over and over again.

This weekend, I have made it my business to return to the institution I never understood: Roman Catholic Seton Hill. It shifted from being all-women to coed and from a college to a university.

Probably thanks to those resets, it's lasted during this era when many liberal arts institutions based in semi-rural areas may be on short time.

Surprisingly, there was a flood of pleasant memories.

I stood in front of the hospital where my freshman BFF - Charlotte Oliwa Toal - had been taken with a kidney ailment. I feared she would die, leaving me alone with all those classmates hoping to graduate with a MRS. But Charlotte made it back to the dorm. That could have saved me from marrying a corporate middle manager.

There also were the houses in which my former literature professor - JoAnne Boyle - had bunked with her husband and seven children. Had it not be for her influence on me, I would have gone pre-med.

Currently there are no longer regret about that. My friends who are medical doctors complain they are no better off than we are in the glutted field of ghostwriting. The health delivery system had changed so much.

JoAnne is dead. It felt a relief that the resentments had also passed into the ether.

The last mandated stop was to peer out from the bottom of the hill at what I had imagined for more than half a century as a force pushing me toward the abyss. It is, I got it, no different from what has dominated my daily life: Staying financially solvent. That's the game.

I couldn't help but smirk when I had an image of all the present literature professors there. Their ability to earn a living could be more touch and go than that of any ghostwriter. If fact, I earned a bundle so far in 2017. And the year still has six months left in it. Making a lot of money, against all odds, has blown through more thick layers of insecurity than therapy.

Where will the next ghostbusting pilgrimage be?

There are about 12 still on the list. Maybe I can some of that outsource that to a Virtual Assistant.